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When Romney Fails at Hating Obama's Ad, Democrats Will Have to Do It

Former Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis expressed his displeasure with what we at The Atlantic Wire are calling the Romney-cancer ad, proving that if the Romney camp can't adequately take advantage of an opportunity, a Democrat will have to do it for them.

Former Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis expressed his displeasure with what we at The Atlantic Wire are calling the Romney-cancer ad, proving that if the Romney camp can't adequately take advantage of an opportunity, a Democrat will have to do it for them. "President Obama owes it to the American people to repudiate this ad," Davis said in a radio interview with Washington's WMAL Thursday, as quoted by ABC News.

For the blissfully uninitiated, the ad, run by Priorities USA, a pro-Obama Super PAC, features a guy who lost his health insurance when he was laid off by a company owned by Romney's former company, Bain Capital, prompting his wife to delay visiting the doctor until her cancer had progressed beyond help. It's been widely seen as a stretch -- and Davis is just the latest Obama supporter to say so. We noted Wednesday that Team Romney ruined a perfectly good moment for righteous outrage when his spokesman Andrea Saul enraged conservatives by pointing out that had the woman lived in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney's health care law likely would have solved her coverage issue. It's not that she didn't also make criticisms similar to Davis', it's just that she also somehow changed the story into a disaster for Romney with his base.

Luckily, there're folks like Davis (admittedly not a fan of Romney's ads, either) to drive the story back where it started. "Bill Burton needs to go back to ethics school," he said, referring to Priorities USA's senior strategist. "He knows perfectly well that the ad is misleading and disgusting and he needs to apologize for it." This means we now we have liberals mad at Obama and conservatives mad at Romney. This is quite the ad!

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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